New GROWers

I am happy to tell you that I have 2 co-GROWers. 2 people who have committed themselves to getting rid of some extra weight. I am going to give you their details now and will post updates as they give them to me. Yayy!!!! I am not alone!!

1. Liz

Weight (30/01/08): 92.1kg
Stomach cm: 102.5
Hips cm: 118
My goal is to get rid of 10 kg in 13 weeks.

2. Blondy

Age 31
Weight : 83kg (not sure about our scale at home…but around there somewhere in any case)
Target weight: 75kg
Target date: end May 2008
What am I doing to lose: herbalife shakes and thermojetics tea, gym twice a week and exercises in the pool.

I will be setting up a spreadsheet to keep track of how we all GROW.

Tip of the day

Whenever I go to gym I am going to ask Mandi, the trainer, or my co-trainees, for tips to give out. Today I have a few.

• Drink lots of water. You need to drink between 1.5 and 2 litres a day. I battle with this so if I remind you I am reminding myself
• Visualise your target. If you cannot picture what you are going to look like then the chances are that you will not get there.
• In order to visualise your target you need to have a target. You cannot just say 'I am going to lose weight', you must have a target. It must be 'I will lose, oops, get rid of x kg/pounds by y date'. And make it achievable not '10kg in 1 month'.
• And lastly you are not going to TRY to get rid of the weight, you ARE going to get rid of it. As Mandi tells us, trying is failing eloquently.

Ok, that's it for today. I had a very good work out at gym this morning. Who is going to join me and send me their details? Come on, I know you can do it!!

Wow!

It was not as bad as I thought, pretty good actually!! Body measurements today and I lost!! I don't have the stats from beginning of Jan but here is comparison with last Dec stats:Since December I lost 1.1kg of body fat, but since 8 Jan I have lost 1.7kg as I picked up 0.6 over Christmas. I think it would have been more if I had not had a bad (or good depending which way you look at it) day at the J&B Met this weekend. We had a good time and ate far too much and I had 2 Hunters Dry's which are mega fattening. I have some info on the best drinks to have when trying to lose weight (I will post it up here later) and cider is definitely not one of them.

So, new motivation. Losing 1.1kg over 2 months is not going to get me to my goal by end of April. It is time to get serious.

Internet problems

I have lots to update but have been having internet problems at home and we are not allowed to use the net too much at work. I will try and update later today.

To follow - J&B met pitfalls, weigh in tomorrow (gulp!), Holford diet, Candida diet, etc....

Join me and GROW yourself

I am looking for support and some co-GROWers. If you are committed to losing weight and would like to join me on my quest then please send me an email or leave a comment. I would like some information about you, not necessarily your real name - can be a pseudonym, but I would like to know your current weight and your target weight and target date. By documenting it you will be committing to it and that really helps with the motivation.

Come on, what have you got to lose??? Not weight because you are going to get rid of the weight, not lose it. Put yourself out there and just do it!! I will keep track of everyone's details and will post regular updates so that we can all see where we are. BUT it is not a competition. We are not here to compete against each other, just against our fat self. I think we are all made up of a fat self and a fit self, your current size shows you who is winning. My fat self is still up there but my fit self is fighting back. I purposely do not talk about a thin self and being thin because it is not all about being skinny. We do not want to be ultra thin, just fit and healthy.

Measurements

I will be having my measurements done every month. I have this done at the gym (more about the gym later). I hope you can see what is going on in the graph above. I have recorded my body fat and lean mass from Feb 2006. There are 5 measurements at various dates.
In the graph the top pink line is my percentage lean weight ie the percentage of my total weight which is not fat. The bottom line is the percentage of my total weight which is fat. The idea is to get these lines to move away from each other. We need to increase the lean weight and decrease the fat weight.

My first total weight measurement in Feb 2006 was 69.6kg. This jumped up to 73kg in September 2006. I am afraid I am a comfort eater and 2006 was not a good year for me. By May 2007 I was 75.3kg. By Nov I had dropped down to 74.5. Then started a major drive to get rid of this weight. By 13 Dec I weighed 73.2kg.

Now for me to get to my target weight of 62kg by mid April I have to lose almost 1kg a week. This ain't gonna be easy and I did not make a good start this year. BUT I did not pick up too much weight over the festive season so I can say that I have got rid of at least 1.5kg.

GROW

This is my blog about losing weight before I turn 40. Uh oh, strike that. When you lose something it means that you intend to find it again. I do not want to lose weight, I want to GET RID OF IT!!!! NEVER TO BE FOUND AGAIN!!

Hence the name of the blog - Get Rid Of Weight by 40.

Now 40 is in May so I do not have long to go and I have 10 kg of body fat to lose. Hmmm, best I get started!

I am going to document my weight removal (cannot say loss, does not compute) and how I have done it here. This will be a very boring blog for anyone else to read unless of course you would like to join me on my journey to slinky slenderness by documenting your details (anonymously of course) along with me.

I am going to gym (small private gym) 2 - 3 times a week and am getting full body fat measurement done once a month. I will post those up here too. (Oh the pressure!)

I was very proud of myself, I lost 1.8 kg from 15 Nov to 13 Dec. Then I only gained 0.2kg over Christmas and New year. Christmas, people!! Traditionally the time for bingeing and not worrying about weight. I will start doing regular updates by putting up pictures pre GROW and my measurements. Stay posted and let me know if you want to join me on my journey